Fostering eco-friendly plantations

How can one extend conservation into landscapes such as commercial plantations outside protected areas? Conservationists around the world are trying to connect productive agriculture and plantations with markets for products certified as coming from farms that follow sustainable and ecologically-friendly practices.

Fostering better cultivation practices and use of native shade trees in coffee plantation

Making space for wildlife in a plantation landscape

Good working conditions, housing, schools, and welfare are integral to sustainability

For better land-use practices in plantations

Protected areas are cornerstones of conservation, but are increasingly isolated in landscapes as fragments surrounded by agriculture and other developments. These surrounding landscapes have significant value for conservation, particularly if favourable land-use practices are adopted. Still, fostering such practices in land-uses such as commercial tea and coffee plantations may need the provision of incentives for planters and plantation companies.

The responses of bats to land-use change have been extensively studied in temperate zones and the neotropics, but little is known from the palaeotropics. Effective conservation in heavily-populated palaeotropical hotspots requires a better understanding of which bats can and cannot survive in human-modified landscapes. We used catching and acoustic transects to examine bat assemblages in the Western Ghats of India, and identify the species most sensitive to agricultural change. We quantified functional diversity and trait filtering of assemblages in forest fragments, tea and coffee plantations, and along rivers in tea plantations with and without forested corridors, compared to protected forests.

Functional diversity in forest fragments and shade-grown coffee was similar to that in protected forests, but was far lower in tea plantations. Trait filtering was also strongest in tea plantations. Forested river corridors in tea plantations mitigated much of the loss of functional diversity and the trait filtering seen on rivers in tea plantations without forested corridors. The bats most vulnerable to intensive agriculture were frugivorous, large, had short broad wings, or made constant frequency echolocation calls. The last three features are characteristic of forest animal-eating species that typically take large prey, often by gleaning.

Ongoing conservation work to restore forest fragments and retain native trees in coffee plantations should be highly beneficial for bats in this landscape. The maintenance of a mosaic landscape with sufficient patches of forest, shade-grown coffee and riparian corridors will help to maintain landscape wide functional diversity in an area dominated by tea plantations.

Many bat species occur in Indian coffee plantations and despite sporadic reports of damage to commercial
coffee crops, the literature shows little evidence for these claims. Measures that have been proposed to
‘control’ fruit bats are likely to be ineffective and even counter-productive. Instead, insect-eating bats
should be encouraged by planters as they help control herbivorous and disease-carrying insects, while fruit
bats pollinate flowers and disperse seeds of many useful plants and shade tree species. More research is
needed to quantify any crop damage caused by bats and to look for sustainable solutions where necessary.

Maligning the elephant: Following the death of two elephants that went by the name Osama in the last five years, T R Shankar Raman wonders what the future holds for the human – elephant relationship. Will it remain a perception of elephants as objects of conflict seen through the coin of economics and the lens of science, when it could lead to co-existence if passed through the prism of humanity?